Heroes abound, and should be revered as such, but don’t count astronauts among them. We work very hard; we did our jobs to near perfection, but that was what we had hired on to do. In no way did we meet the criterion of the Congressional Medal of Honor: ‘above and beyond the call of duty.’

The Q&A is intertwingled with quotes from Collins’ book Carrying the Fire, which I read back in middle school. Farrar, Straus & Giroux released a new edition of it to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon.

Edited to fix broken markup. Sorry about that, folks.

Novosti agency photo of Sputnik 1′s launch via spacetoday.org

A half century later, we have landed rovers on Mars, parachuted instruments onto the oven-baked surface of Venus, and put others in orbit around Jupiter and Saturn.

Humans haven’t been out further than the Moon, but our space probes own the Solar System. All that started back in 1957. To everyone building, flying, designing and managing unmanned spacecraft, thank you.

Update: It launched, but we had unbroken cloud cover to the south, so I only saw it for a couple of seconds through a gap in the clouds.

A commuter down South by La Palma got a shot of it staging. They didn’t know what they were watching.

The launch was visible from as far east as Phoenix, Arizona.

I saw the previous twilight launch from Vandenberg, a Minuteman ICBM carrying a target for an interceptor test, back in 2002.

This time the payload is a military satellite. The launch vehicle is the Minotaur, a decommissioned Minuteman ICBM, with a couple of extra stages from a Pegasus on top that give the extra kick to put the payload in orbit. It burns solid fuel, which produces an easy to see plume.

Spaceflight Now has a status page for the launch, so check it to see if they are still on schedule.

There’s information on watching launches out of Vandenberg at Space Archive.

If you’re taking pictures, share and tag!

A friend found Autostitch, a UBC Computer Science Department project for ‘stitching’ together photos into panoramas, and threw some photos from the Apollo Moon landing missions into it.

Some of the results, like the Sea of Tranquility seen from the window of Eagle (above) are amazing. We put the results up as a Flickr photoset.

Bathsheba Grossman etches that 3-D map into a cube of crystal using a laser.

A friend received one of these for a Christmas present. It’s a wonderfully geeky piece of sculpture. I want one.

Spirit’s in the hills a couple of miles from where it landed back in January, so it has some great views. I’ve been waiting for these shots.

Until this year, we had to imagine what the scene would be like.

You can select from Cassini’s two cameras, any of the objects it photographed during the roundabout trip (including Venus, Earth, and Jupiter,) images from a day or range of days, and by distance to the subject.

It’d be nice to get some sort of feedback on the results while you’re constructing the query, updating the form with a sample thumbnail of the target, and the number of expected results. The rough sizes of result sets could be baked into the static form with each database update.

I hope NASA’s web team will create a similar browser for the Mars Rover images.

Oh, and can we get an RSS feed of press-release images?

I grew up watching the Apollo flights to the Moon, but when I was able to read and haunt the school library, I learned about the X-15, the rocket-powered space plane NASA flew out of Edwards Air Force Base during the 1960′s.

The X-15 came straight out of science fiction (remember, the Shuttle didn’t fly until I started high school) a sleek black plane with a rocket motor that flew to the edge of space and glided back to earth instead of a scorched capsule splashing into the ocean with half a naval task force chasing it.

Flying to the Moon was a hell of a feat, and it’s no surprise NASA chose Neil Armstrong for the first landing, he’d already distinguished himself as a pilot flying the X-15 and Gemini. But to me, even if landing on the Moon was amazing, flying a space plane was cool.

The X-15 still holds the unofficial altitude record for aircraft: 108 kilometers. SpaceShipOne barely broached 100 kilometers when it flew Monday morning.

The black dart remains part of California culture and politics. Before the late state senator Pete Knight campaigned to write discrimination into the California Constitution, he became the fastest pilot on Earth, flying an X-15 to Mach 6.7.

In 1961 Richard Donner made a movie about the X-15 with Charles Bronson as the perfect pilot, Mary Tyler Moore as the perfect pilot’s wife, and Jimmy Stewart as the narrator (in USAF uniform.)

The Right Stuff, from 1983, remains the better movie about test pilots and astronauts, even it doesn’t have X-15′s.

Eleven years later, Shôji Kawamori, and Shinichirô Watanabe revisited the test pilot mythology in Macross Plus where the colony world of New Eden looked like California from the giant hangers at the “New Dryden Flight Test Center”, the ranks of wind turbines in the mountains, to a barely disguised Fisherman’s Wharf ‘ship’s wheel’ sign. They mixed the test pilot story with Top Gun. Two pilots compete over a military contract for a next generation mecha, and for the affections of their high school sweetheart.

And seeing that we’re back to thinking about our old crushes, I’ll finish.